Greek:
Malagma
= poultice ,malkos
= soft ; Latin: malagma.a.
An alloy of mercury with another metal through fusion. b. The extraction of
precious metals from their ores by treatment with mercury.

Calcination

Latin:
calx = Lime.To intensely
heat (as with inorganic materials) to a high temperature, but without fusion,
in order to drive off volatile matter, or to effect changes (as oxidation or pulverization.)
What remains is a fine dry powder.

The heating
of limestone Ca CO3, or slaked lime Ca(OH)2 to produce quicklime CaO, calx
vita. -- When water is added, quicklime has the property of generating heat.

The
fire of calcination is a purging whitening fire. For example, cremation produces
calx; the fire acts upon the black stuff of the nigredo or mortificatio,
and turns it white. This process is connected with the symbolism of Purgatory,
the eternal punitive fire. -- The notion that the wicked are punished in the afterlife
was widespread in antiquity: Ixion was punished for trying to seduce Hera by being
bound to a perpetual wheel of fire. The goddesses called the Erinyes, Erinues
, (the Furies or Eumenides) burnt the damned with their torches. The Pyriphlegethon
is an igneous river surrounding Tartarus. Lucian in his True Histories describes
the island of the impious as an immense brazier. [Edinger]

In
the Sibyline Oracles, Book III, "And then shall a great river of flaming
fire will flow down from heaven, and consume all places."

In
the book of Daniel (3:12-30), Nebuchadnezzar orders everyone to prostrate
themselves to the golden image of himself. All do this, but the Jews, Shadrack,
Meschack, and Abednego --who are thrown alive into the fiery furnace. They
remain unharmed in the flames, and a fourth unknown man is seen among them, and
the form of the fourth man is like unto the Son of God.

In
Revelations (20:13-15), "And the sea gave up her dead, Death & Hades
gave up the dead in them, and all were judged by what they had done, and if anyones
name was not in the Book of Life, he was thrown into the Lake of Fire."

Coagulation

Latin:
coagulum =to
curdle; from cogere = to drive together.a.
The process which turns something into earth : Cooling which turns a liquid into
a solid.b. A
solid that has been dissolved into a solvent reappears when that solvent is evaporated;
or a chemical reaction may produce a new compound that is solid.c.
"earth" is one of the synonyms for the coagulatio
-- it is heavy and permanent, of fixed position and shape.d.
In Roland: A Lexicon of Alchemy, the 3 agents of Coagulatio are:
1. Magnesia
2. Lead
3. Sulphure.In medieval psychological thought, for a psychic content
to become "earth" means it has been concretized in a particular
localized form -- that is, it has been attached to an ego. The coagulatio
has often been equated with Creation.f.
Myths tell us that coagulatio is promoted by action
-- diving, churning, whirling motion.

TheTurba Philosophorum states an alchemical recipe for coagulation: "Take
quicksilver, coagulate in the body of Magnesia, in Kuhul (lead), or in Sulphur
which does not burn If mercury is amalgamated with another metal, the amalgam
solidifies -- Similarly, mercury combines with sulphur to form a solid, mercury
sulfide." [Edinger]

Conjunction

Latin:
jungere = to join;jugum = to yoke together;from the Greek: Zygon,
zygon; and the Sanskrit:juga.

The Coniunctio
is the culmination of the alchemists opus, with both extroverted and introverted
aspects. It is both the chemical and physical combination in which two substances
come together to form a third substance with different properties, such as the
fusion of molten metals, and the amalgams by the union of mercury with other metals.
This is the common alchemical image of SOL & LUNA entering the mercurial
fountain, representing the dissolving of gold and silver in mercury. Another chemical
combination used by the alchemists is the union of mercury and sulphur to form
red mercuric oxide, (Hg + S à
HgS.) [Edinger]

In the
two phases of the Lesser and Greater Coniunctio, the Lesser is the
union or fusion of substances not yet thoroughly separated or discriminated. It
is always followed by death or mortificiato. The product is a contaminated
mixture that must be subjected to further procedures. In alchemical symbolism,
the product is pictured as killed, maimed, or fragmented.

In
the Greater Coniunctio -- the Opus -- the goal is the creation of the miraculous
"Philo- sophers Stone," produced by the final union of the purified
opposites, which mitigates and rectifies all "one-sidedness." The Stone
has the power to give life, to purify all corrupt, to soften the hard, and to
harden the soft. [Edinger]

Impregnation

Latin:
pregnans = to impregnate.

To interpenetrate
or saturate thoroughly in order to produce a chemical or metallurgical crystalization
or compound.

In early metallurgy, streams,
galleries of mines, and caves are identified with the vagina of the Earth-Mother
: everything that lies in the belly of the earth is alive and in a state of gestation.
The ores extracted from mines are embryonic; they grow slowly as if in obedience
to some temporal rhythm other than that of vegetable and animal organisms, they
"grow ripe" in their telluric darkness.

The
mining of metals from the bowels of the earth is an operation executed before
its time. With these metals the metallurgist was succeeding the work of Nature,
which in time would have ripened these metals to "perfection." [Eliade,
p. 42]

Precipitation

Latin:
praecipit = to throw violently; praeceps=
to fall or comesuddenly into some
condition.a.To cause to separate from solution or suspension.b.
To cause vapor to condense and fall or deposit.c.
To fall or cascade as rain or snow, as is the aspect of the fertilization of the
earth by the Tiamat Dragon of the Rain as described in the Enuma
Elish, the Mesopotamian creation epic.

Purification

Sanskrit:
panati = he cleanses;
Latin: purus, akin to Old High German: fowen
= to sift.

a.
To clear from material defilement, imperfection, or extraneous
matter.b.In The Phaedo, Plato states, "Purification consists
in separating the soul as much as possible from the body, and accustoming it to
withdraw from all contact with the body, and to concentrate itself by itself,
and have its own dwelling, free from the shackles of the body." [Plato,
Phaedo 67c-68b]

Reverberation

Latin:
verber= a rod, hence to
lash.a. To
reflect < ~ heat or light >b.
To become driven back.c.
To subject to the action of a reverberatory furnace (i.e. a kiln or furnace
in which heat is radiated from the roof.

Solutio

Latin:
solutio; solvere = to loosen, to solve.a.
To turn a solid into a liquid.b. An
act or process by which a solid, liquid, or gaseous substance is homogeneously
mixed with a liquid, or sometimes a gas or
solid.c. The
homogeneous mixture formed by this process : especially a single-phase liquid system.
(From 1904, a solvate is an aggregate that consists of a solute ion or molecule
with one or more solvent molecules; also a substance (such as a hydrate)
containing such ions.)d.
In the solutio process, the solid seems to disappear into the solution
as if it had been swallowed up.e.Solutio is the return to differentiated matter to its undifferentiated
state --its materia prima.f.
Mercury has the capacity to dissolve or amalgamate with
gold and silver. The process ancient process for extracting gold from crude ore
is to pulverize and treat the ore with mercury which dissolves the gold;
the mercury is then separated from the gold by distilling it with heat.

In
spiritual alchemy, SOL & LUNA represent the personalitys masculine and
feminine principles "concretely" manifested in the personality at the
beginning of the process. SOL = the dominant conscious attitude, and LUNA = the
anima of its current state of development -- these two are dissolved by "friendly
water," which is mercury, and equated in the womb, corresponding with the
materia prima. In this incest symbolism of SOL & LUNA, Love and
Lust are the agents of Solutio.

Sublimation

Latin:
sublimis= to elevate over a threshold.To cause to pass off from the solid to the vapor
state by heating, and again to condense into solid form.a.
A low substance is translated into a higher substance by an ascending movement:
Earth is transformed into Air; a fixed body is volitatized; that which is
inferus into that which is superus. The sublimate flies up from
earth, and is transported to heaven. The alchemists vessel was equated
with the Macrocosm, its lower retort representing the earth, its upper retort
heaven.b. The
"expulsion of the quicksilver" is done by sublimatio, which releases
the spirit hidden in matter. Sublimatio can also mean "hammering"
or "grinding" down to rhinisima ("filings") to
bring about a complete attenuation of the material : very fine powder approaches
a gas in its consistency. The symbolism of grinding contains the moral categories
of good and bad: i.e. "fine" and "coarse." [Edinger]

c. In psychological terms, Carl Jung criticizes
Sigmund Freuds theory of sublimation thus: "Sublimation is not
a voluntary and the forcible channeling of instinct into a spurious field of application
[as Freud states], but an alchemical transformation for which fire and the black
materia prima are needed. Sublimatio is a great mystery. Freud
has appropriated this concept and usurped it for the sphere of the will, and the
bourgeois, rationalistic theos." [C.G. Jung, Letters, I:171]

d.Comment: Item c. brings
to this curators (J.R.) mind many questions of political perspective, and
while Jung is quoted here, I steadfastly resist Jung's narrow political, non-dialectical,
non-Keynesian perspective, clearly implying that anyone should easily be
at liberty to avoid the repressive economic and social forces pressed upon
the individual personality, the forces of organized religion against free mystical
thought, and especially the organized categorical methods of "formal education"
pressed against independent intellectual inquiry and determination.

Sublimination is a critical universal function which works on every
level of biologic and physical "reality" -- the biophysical and astrophysical,
the instinctual, the subconsious, the "Unconscious", the historical,
the developmental, and economic and social, the expansive, the implosive,
and the transformative.

: For a further discussion and review
of the problem of "sublimation," I strongly recommend a
reading of Norman O. Browns seminal work Life Against Death,
[Vintage Press, 1959], especially the chapters: "The Ambiguities of Sublimation,"
and "The Excremental Vision." I also recommend, regarding this
controversy, Georg Groddecks (a correspondent of Freud), The Book
of the IT, (Psychoanalytischer Verlag; Vienna; 1923), Herbert MarcusesEros and Civilization, (Beacon Press, 1955); Fredrich Engels'
The Origin of the Family (1846), and reference to my own "Psychles:
The Nagging Question of Cyclic Time vs. Apocalyptic Time : A Table,"
under the page titled Origins of the Specious.

Volitilization

Latin:
volate= to fly.a.
To cause to pass off into a vapor.b.
Readily vaporizable at relatively low temperature.c.
Also, tending to erupt violently.d.
In psychological terms, characterized as subject to unexpected or rapid change;
also, lighthearted, lively; explosive; unable to hold the attention fixed because
of an inherent lightness or fickleness of disposition.